WhatsApp has just added bold, italicised and strikethrough formatting to its text options. The features, which are a first for the messaging platform, allow richer text but are hidden in the app and can only be used by adding certain characters to your message.

By including asterisks on each side of a word you can turn text bold, including underscores on each side of a word adds italic formatting and surrounding it with tildes, ~like this~, will strikethrough a word.

Here's how the new Whatsapp formatting works

*bold* = bold_italic_ = italic~strikethrough~ = strikethrough

The features are available for the iOS and Android WhatsApp app and should automatically install (version 2.12.17 for iPhones and 2.12.535 for Android handsets), allow it to compete with other messaging services that already include formatting like Slack.